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Electronic cigarettes sales have skyrocketed at one Red Deer smoke shop, but a city decision Thursday to fold them under smoking bylaws has left local vendors steaming. “We’ve had e-cigs for five or six years, but in the last year it’s really exploded,” says Nicole Rasse, an employee of the family-owned Gord’s Smoke Shop. “It’s kind of a bigger thing down in the States, but it’s making its way to Canada.”

Taiwan realized the goal of providing universal health care coverage by launching the National Health Insurance (NHI) program in 1995. Covering 99.9 per cent of the population, including prison inmates, the NHI gives patients access to care ranging from Western drugs and procedures to traditional Chinese medicine.

Food is a source of comfort and pleasure, but there’s big money involved in keeping you slurping sweet soft drinks and gorging on fast food. Don’t blame the victim, there are a lot of people at fault for obesity.

Can we all just agree that sugar, fat, wheat gluten, dairy, meat and salt are poisons that are killing us? If you read the newspapers, browse the Internet or watch television news, you could very well draw that conclusion. And there are large numbers of people who make the avoidance of one or more of those items a central element of their lives. We are becoming a nation of food tribalists, defined not by where we live or the language we speak, but by what we don’t eat.

Using antibiotics to promote livestock growth remains legal on Canadian farms, even as the U.S. government moves to crack down on the practice and a growing chorus of voices warns of a potential public health risk. “A lot of these products that are available are cost-effective, but we need to stop this nonsense,” said Jan Slomp, president of the National Farmers Union, which is calling for an all-out ban on the use of antibiotics other than for reasons of medical necessity. “It is not in the farmer’s interest, or the consumer’s.”

H5N1 is a type of influenza virus that causes a highly infectious, severe respiratory disease in birds called avian influenza (or "bird flu"). Human cases of H5N1 avian influenza occur occasionally, but it is difficult to transmit the infection from person to person. When people do become infected, the mortality rate is about 60%.

TORONTO - Infectious disease watchers were worried in the late summer of 2013. The largest annual mass gathering in the world, the Hajj, was approaching. Meanwhile, infections with the new MERS coronavirus were mounting weekly in Saudi Arabia, where more than two million of the Muslim faithful would soon gather.

Chronic exposure to air pollution causes nearly nine times as many premature deaths in Canada as traffic crashes, University of B.C. researchers say in an article published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The World Health Organization says it believes polio has erupted in war-torn Syria, a dire development in the fight to eradicate the disease.
The Geneva-based agency says a cluster of more than 10 paralysis cases have been detected in Deir Al Zour province in eastern Syria, a contested area of the country.

If you missed out on World Breastfeeding Week, observed this year from Aug. 1 to Aug. 7, TheBump.com is keeping the spirit alive with their second annual Public Display of Breastfeeding Day on August 15.

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have invited outside experts to help it deal with a large outbreak of the new coronavirus in the eastern Saudi city of al Hofuf, and a Canadian infectious diseases specialist is among them.

It’s predicted to become one of the world’s biggest medical burdens and it’s on the rise in Calgary, recently becoming the No. 1 counselling request at the Calgary Counselling Centre: depression — a despairing, often crippling mood disorder. In response to this growing need for treatment, the Calgary Counselling Centre announced Friday that it’s expanding its depression programs as part of its commitment to avoid a client wait-list. The centre is in the process of hiring more staff, offering additional depression counselling services and providing best-practice training to staff and community therapists.

LONDON — The World Health Organization said Monday it is too soon to say whether there could be an outbreak of a SARS-like killer respiratory disease after health officials in Britain announced they detected a related virus in a severely ill patient from the Middle East.